What do cannibals, mass murderers, and terrorists have in common? Okay, there are maybe a few
things. But today we're going to focus on one particular aspect: they’re all groups of people
held in Penal Colony number 6, or Black Dolphin Prison. And it isn't Russia’ most high-security
and possibly most brutal prison for no reason. This is a place that has been compared to
Soviet gulags and Nazi concentration camps and inspired protests in the form of self-mutilation.
Fancy going on a quick tour?
Pull up at penal colony number six and the first thing visible on the lawn outside is
a huge statue of — you guessed it — a black dolphin. Although normally a friendly and
benign creature, the dolphin seems fairly foreboding outside such an ominous place.
Especially considering the inmate who built it was probably a mass murderer
or something. Was it a cry for help? A metaphor for life inside the prison?
Well, time to go inside and see for ourselves.
Walk inside the prison and you'll notice that everything revolves around one thing:
security. At first, it doesn't seem like there are any inmates here at all.
The place is completely silent, with the inmates firmly locked away most of the time.
What’s happening behind closed doors, nobody knows.
Although prisoners spend the vast majority of their time at Black Dolphin in their cells,
they occasionally need to be let out. Maybe they want to head to the
exercise cell for their daily expedition, or need to go to the hospital. Naturally,
guards can't just escort them in a civilized manner. These are dangerous prisoners.
When guards transport prisoners from A to B, even handcuffs aren't enough.
Each prisoner must be blindfolded and bent over as guards guide them along from behind.
This ensures the inmates can’t memorize the layout of the building and plot a crafty getaway.
Dignity doesn’t exist here. As they walk along, guards kick and punch them
while heavy metal music blasts out from the speakers. Not for entertainment purposes.
It’s all to add to the disorientation — and presumably to add some extra fear and mania.
This violence is a daily part of life in penal colony number
six. The bad treatment includes torture in the form of electric shocks as well as beatings.
It’s so brutal that one inmate, Roman Sarychev,
died from his beatings at the hands of guards just three hours after arriving in the prison.
This is fairly commonplace in Russia. In the northern country, 2,700 prisoners died in
custody in 2019. Although some of these deaths may have been from illnesses or, erm, natural causes,
let’s be real here. It’s likely most of them came down to torture and beatings from guards.
Even prisoner on prisoner violence is unusual at Black Dolphin since all the inmates are isolated
from each other. Of course, the staff make up for this shortfall by inflicting the pain themselves.
In one case, a guard strangled a prisoner with a bedsheet while he was sleeping.
Clearly, the guy was posing so much danger to society and the rest of
the prisoners while he was getting some shut-eye. It wasn’t an unusual incident.
Another guard killed a prisoner by slamming a bookshelf into his head,
giving him a brain hemorrhage. I’m just surprised there was a bookshelf in the prison.
These are just the cases we know of. After all,
prison staff aren’t exactly forthcoming and transparent about the figures.
Although guards are required to wear cameras so their superiors can monitor what’s happening on
the ground, these cameras mysteriously stop working whenever something happens that could
make the wearer look bad. By look bad, we mean murdering a prisoner. This happened in
the case of Sarychev, the man who guards beat to death. Although camera footage showed the first
part of the beatings, there’s no footage of him dying. Nothing suspicious there.
Of course, it’s easy enough to put two and two together. When his body was taken to the mortuary,
staff told the man’s distraught family that his body had been flung around
like a rubber toy, his corpse full of strange and disturbing bruises.
Meanwhile, medical facilities are almost non-existent. Care is delayed as long
as possible, and even inmates with serious diseases like HIV and AIDs
have been denied treatment periodically. Around a third of the prison deaths may be down to AIDs.
Plus, the prison has been around since 1745,
meaning it’s not exactly built for hygiene. Epidemics are common.
It might sound harsh, and, well, it is harsh. But when you get to know these guys,
you’ll understand why people are scared of them. Cough, cannibalism, cough.
There are around 700 prisoners inside Black Dolphin prison. Between them,
they've killed over 3,500 people – that's an average of five people for each prisoner.
You don’t want to get on their wrong side.
In case you were getting curious about who these guys are, here’s a quick breakdown.
First up, former KGB officer and executive Alexey Pichugin. He's responsible for the murders of four
of his business rivals. He obviously took the idea of killing the competition too literally.
Strangely, that’s probably the most reasonable crime of all these guys.
By the way, we were shocked too- bloodthirsty,
murderous KGB officers seems to be something that Vladimir Putin would reward, not imprison.
Next is Igor Tischenko, a man who had some family drama on another level. He and his father
got involved in a crazy Moscow gang shootout that resulted in the deaths of seven people
and the injuries of even more. Now, father and son are both locked up.
Tischenko says he's trying to stay human in Black Dolphin instead of
turning into an animal. Good luck to him for that — this place is crazy.
Then you have Nikolai Astankov. He brutally killed a family of five
and burned their bodies in a forest.
Not crazy enough for you? Next.
Vladimir Nikolayev accidentally killed a man after a drunken fight, and that's the most normal part
of his crime. After the murder, he did what any thinking man would do: dragged the body inside
his house and cut it into small pieces. Looking at the tiny pieces laid out in front of him
and still in a drunken stupor, a strange thought crossed his mind. What did human meat taste like?
He boiled part of the thigh and tried it, but wasn’t a fan of the taste. Still,
not one to give so early, Nikolayev suspected a touch of deep frying would do the trick.
Bingo! It was delicious. He was pleased with the outcome, but he needed to eat far
more to get rid of the evidence. He’d never finish the whole body himself.
So, he gave a friend a present: part of the body. Was his friend also a cannibal? Not exactly.
Nikolayev told them it was kangaroo meat, knowing that no Russian would
know what kangaroo was supposed to taste like. Smart. The man ate it in dumplings
along with his wife and children. I'll give you a moment to digest that...
But he’s still not the worst of the bunch.
Mikhail Popkov is one of the worst murderers and criminals in global history. He committed
81 rapes and murders in total –and they were just the crimes he actually confessed to.
The Russian media calls him The Werewolf. Ironically, he was a cop.
Yeah, I wasn’t kidding when I said these guys were hardcore. But in all fairness,
there are allegations that some Russian reports of crime aren’t credible.
Police have been known to beat and threaten suspects until they give confessions. So,
maybe these are all nice guys who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You never know.
But I sure hope not, because they have to endure some damn difficult conditions in Black Dolphin.
Life there is pure isolation. One door alone was never going to be sufficient to ensure they can't
escape. Instead, the prison uses a three-door system. A full metal door shuts the prisoner
into their cell, followed by two consecutive cage doors –⁠ it’s like a cell within a cell.
Even if some escape artist managed to get through all three doors,
they’d still have to contend with the in-cell cameras that staff monitor 24/7.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that nobody has ever managed to escape from the prison.
Oh, and just in case there was any doubt about the difficulty of getting out,
guards also make rounds every 15 minutes. If you want to pick all three locks and run away
before the guards watching CCTV footage come for you, you’ve got to be quick.
There's not much hope of getting released, either. Most of the prisoners in Black Dolphin
have no hope of leaving. As one prison lieutenant grimly put it, the only way to leave is by dying.
But bizarrely, one of the few inmates to be released actually wanted to go straight back.
55-year-old murderer Gambar Makhmudov was released from his 11-year sentence
in Black Dolphin in 2018, presumably out of pity to enjoy his retirement or something.
But instead of heading home to enjoy a quiet life and do some jigsaws, Makhmudov had other ideas.
He barely made it to the train station before he could no longer contain his wild side.
Instead of calmly making it home, he went on a crazy killing rampage,
stabbing an employee and a commuter multiple times with a kitchen knife.
Clearly, Black Dolphin Prison did a fantastic job of rehabilitation.
When police arrived on the scene and shot Makhmudov with a stun gun,
he had only one request. He wanted to be sent back to Black Dolphin jail,
the blissful paradise filled with mass murderers and cannibals. Well,
it’s safe to say he scuppered the dreams of every other inmate who actually wanted to
leave that place. I doubt they're going to let anyone else leave any time soon.
Why did he want to go back? You might be thinking
that the prison can't be so bad after all. Well, let's look at the evidence.
While imprisoned, the only contact prisoners get with the outside world is four visits a year.
Not that our cannibal can expect a visit any time
soon from that friend he tricked into eating his forensic evidence.
As for other little luxuries, well, there aren't many. Prisoners can spend an hour a
day exercising. But instead of a nice green area or even some fake grass,
all the Black Dolphin inmates get is an empty concrete yard. And by yard,
I mean a room indoors with railings over the top. It’s basically just another cell,
but it's slightly bigger and you're allowed to move around in there.
While the prisoners are pacing back and forth trying not to go crazy,
the guards inspect their cells to check for contraband.
The prison is also designed to avoid fostering any kind of humanity
or sympathy. Each door features a description of the crime the prisoner inside committed, to
serve as a stark reminder to prison officers that there’s no need for them to feel any sympathy.
After getting their daily exercise, some prisoners might head off to work. Inmates
can either do manual labor in a workshop or work a sewing machine to earn some coin. They can use
their salaries toward personal items or phone calls. Or other black-market substances, maybe.
As for socializing, it’s tough luck. Prisoners must eat their meals in their cells,
limiting the time they have to talk to each other.
Most meals are soup and bread. Yummy. Each prisoner remains in their one-man
cell the entire day other than the 90 minute period they can leave to work and exercise.
Cells have no windows, a low ceiling, and everyone’s favorite color of paint:
light yellow. Russian law states that each inmate
should have two square meters of space, but this requirement isn’t always met.
Conditions here are so bad that protesting by hunger strike was deemed too soft. Instead,
inmates have mutilated themselves or committed suicide to raise awareness of their conditions.
Considering there are only four visits a year and prisoners are watched constantly,
available methods to get the word out there are few and far between.
Gangs of prisoners have also organized riots in protest. In Black Dolphin prison,
150 people were involved in such a protest, and four individuals were hospitalized as a
consequence. Let's not think about the backlash they faced from the guards.
In another prison in Russia, 300 inmates slashed themselves with razor blades on their wrists,
necks, and stomachs. In yet another institution, prisoners cut their wrists
because officers forced them to eat off the same plate as prisoners from a lower caste,
aka those who had committed worse crimes.
It’s testament to the poor prison conditions in Russia in general. The country has one of the
highest prison populations in the world outside of the US, yet with a much smaller population.
Now, check out our videos about Guantanamo Bay prison and the man no prison can keep locked up.